I'd say you're right, but it's the extra stuff that Haskell associates with monads that make them hard to learn. Here's how I'd break it down: 1. The three Mon

I'd say you're right, but it's the extra stuff that Haskell associates with monads that make them hard to learn. Here's how I'd break it down: 1. The three Monad laws, which have been beaten to death. 2. do-notation. You've started to learn Haskell, and you know the let-in syntax for introducing variable bindings, and suddenly you get hit with two NEW syntaxes: the let-but-no-in syntax, and the weird <- stuff. How do these syntaxes relate, and why (if?) are they all necessary? Also you just lost fifteen minutes because that line has a tab instead of spaces, the "last statement must be an expression" nonsense, etc. 3. Monadic APIs, especially IO. You can go through an entire Monad tutorial and be left wondering why you need category theory to get main's argv. Not to mention all of the duplication (mapM, filterM, zipWithM, etc). Tutorials tend to focus on #1, but in my journey I found #2 and #3 to give me the most difficulty.